[sliverstorm]

Hmm... That would rather seem to be the monitoring company's own fault. Admittedly I haven't used ec2 for about 3 years, but I seem to recall there being an explicit disclaimer about how it wasn't supposed to be used for this kind of uptime-critical application. I want to say it even specifically mentioned medical stuff.

[gte910h]

EC2 is fine for part of the servers. I'd honestly say you should have multiple locations of servers, managed via different means (so the single points of failure are not there).

EC2 just shouldn't be ALL of the servers.

[zaidf]

Agree. I'd avoid cloud for half as critical apps where I cannot CLEARLY picture where my servers are in a physical sense and how I can physically get a hold of them if shit hits the fan.

[jrockway]

How do you physically get a hold of your servers if the gas main under them blows up or a tornado sucks them up and drops them a hundred miles away?

Servers are not physical things that you can just go get when there are problems. They are imaginary devices that can suddenly vaporize, leaving no trace. Plan your deployment accordingly, and you won't need to be writing emails saying that people are dying because your data center blew up. Your systems will silently switch over to some other data center and you'll file a claim with your insurance company to have the servers replaced on Monday morning.

In other words, "the cloud" had nothing to do with this problem. It could happen if the server was physically attached to you or in a abandoned missle silo with an army of armed guards.

[madaxe]

Nah, you can use EC2 for uptime-critical apps, you just have to a) not be a dipshit and b) stick your stuff in as many AZs as you can, and ELB it.